Monday, April 15, 2013

K-12 Issues in Mix as State Legislatures Wrap Up

State lawmakers continue to grapple with high-profile K-12 issues
as legislative sessions approach or cross the finish line nationwide.
School choice, school safety, and education funding are prominent among
them.

No single issue dominated legislatures this year, although some policy patterns have emerged.

Proponents of vouchers and tax credits for private school tuition,
for example, have experienced a largely uphill battle in statehouses.
Many states continue to sort out details of complicated changes to
school finance, including a focus on the needs of disadvantaged students
and performance on tests.

The possibility of teacher pay raises is also on the horizon in at least two states.

And despite setbacks in two Southern states for efforts to force
withdrawal from the Common Core State Standards, bills that would do so
are alive in three states in the Midwest.

All 50 states convened their legislatures this year.

‘Terrified of a Mouse’

Compared with the last two years of statehouse activity, school
choice advocates have less to celebrate so far in 2013, said Matthew
Ladner, the senior adviser for policy and research at the Foundation for
Excellence in Education, a policy and advocacy group based in
Tallahassee, Fla., that supports vouchers.

One of the biggest setbacks for choice proponents occurred in
Texas, where the House of Representatives voted 103-43 earlier this
month to effectively ban vouchers and tax-credit scholarships. The vote
was a rebuke to Republicans like Gov. Rick Perry and Sen. Dan Patrick,
the chairman of his chamber’s education committee, who has introduced a tax-credit-scholarship bill and held a hearing on it last week despite the House vote.

Mr. Ladner said the failure of tax-credit scholarships and
vouchers can be attributed, in part, to rural districts’ decision to
frighten Texas House members into believing that vouchers and the tax
credits are a dire threat to those districts’ financial lifeblood, even
as Texas public school enrollment steadily grows.

“They have pulled off a framing of the issue that reminds me of the cartoonish elephant that was terrified of a mouse,” he said.

The news hasn’t been entirely dour for school choice: A
tax-credit-scholarship plan was approved in Alabama after a brief but
vigorous court challenge.

But in Wisconsin, GOP Gov. Scott Walker’s push to expand the
state’s voucher program has run into resistance from some of his
Republican allies in the legislature. And Tennessee Gov. Bill Haslam,
another Republican, withdrew his voucher proposal this month.

Christina Brey, a spokesman for the Wisconsin Education
Association Council, a state teachers’ union with about 72,000 members,
ascribed much of the pushback against vouchers in her state to
superintendents and school board members and lauded their advocacy.

Sharp Contrast

In contrast to two years ago, when Gov. Walker successfully pushed
to cut collective bargaining rights for teachers as part of an effort
to slash the state budget, she said, the conversation in Wisconsin has
turned to the state’s $1.3 billion surplus.

“We’ve seen Senate GOP leadership saying school funding to public schools needs to be addressed,” Ms. Brey said.

Not so, says state Sen. Glenn Grothman, a Republican and assistant
majority leader who wants tax breaks for private-school tuition as a
compliment to Mr. Walker’s voucher plan. “Scott Walker is doing nothing
to help parents whose children don’t go to schools in certain cities,”
he said.

One of the most ambitious efforts to recast K-12 finance is under way in Colorado,
where a plan that aims to help districts with low levels of property
wealth, but high concentrations of low-income students and
English-language-learners, has cleared one key legislative hurdle with
just under a month to go in the 2013 session.

The plan, proposed by Sen. Mike Johnston, a Democrat and a Teach
For America alumnus, would require the state to provide a higher share
of education funding for districts with high enrollments of low-income
and English-language-learner students, and would also provide funds to
help districts address major K-12 policy changes passed three years ago.

Mr. Johnston, who represents the Denver area, has said that the
plan, which passed the Senate this month, would stop rewarding districts
with relatively high costs of living and would instead focus on
students who need more academic help.

But the plan would require a tax increase of about $1 billion, and therefore under state law must be passed as a ballot measure.

Republicans have complained the bill is unfriendly to charters and
would ultimately be a major tax hike. All GOP senators voted against
it, but Democrats control the legislature.

One open question is the extent to which Gov. John Hickenlooper, a
Democrat who is up for re-election in 2014, would actively campaign for
the proposed tax increase even if he signs Mr. Johnston’s bill, said
Jane Urschel, the deputy executive director of the Colorado Association
of School Boards.

It’s also unclear how, or whether, the state supreme court, which is considering a K-12 funding lawsuit, Lobato v. Colorado, would let the bill’s progress affect its own decisionmaking.

Noting that the state’s last K-12 finance overhaul was in 1988,
Mr. Urschel added: “The current school finance act just isn’t aligned
with any of the reforms that have been passed in the state, or any of
the reforms passed by Congress.”

California Debate

In a similar vein,
California Gov. Jerry Brown, a Democrat, wants districts with more than
50 percent of their enrollments consisting of English-learners and
low-income students to receive additional per-student state aid, up to
$2,600 for each student that puts them over the 50 percent threshold.

But a general appetite in California for higher school funding—in
the wake of the ballot-box victory last fall for Proposition 30, which
boosted support for K-12 through tax increases—hasn’t meant universal
acclaim for Mr. Brown’s plan.

For example, the state Legislative Analyst’s Office and the Oakland-based advocacy group Education Trust-West have said the plan should be strengthened to ensure that more state aid translates to more targeted help for students.

The Legislative Analyst’s Office, for example, says that the plan
would allow for the new funds to be used on broad teacher pay raises,
and that this “does not result in additional services for the students
with additional needs who generated the additional funding.”

In Maryland, in a move to both maintain existing schools and open
new ones in the Baltimore city district, the legislature approved a plan
to allow $1.1 billion in bonds for capital spending. Baltimore schools
chief Andrés Alonso praised the state’s emphasis on “modernized school buildings.”

Arizona lawmakers are considering a very different plan. Under a bill backed by Gov. Jan Brewer,
a Republican, the state would allocate $54 million for fiscal 2014 (and
more in future years) to reward districts whose students perform well
on standardized tests. The fiscal 2014 amount would include $18 million
in reallocated funds from basic K-12 aid.

But the proposal has drawn criticism. “For most students,
performance funding favors wealthier local education agencies,” argue
David R. Garcia, a professor at Arizona State University’s Mary Lou
Fulton Teachers College, and Anabel Aportela, the director of research
and evaluation at the Center for Student Achievement, a program of the
Arizona Charter Schools Association, in a report on the proposal.

Raises for Teachers?

The mechanics of education finance play a big role in an Iowa bill
that focuses heavily on teacher pay and professional development, areas
that have received relatively less attention in state capitals than in
past years.

Gov. Terry Branstad, a Republican, has been pushing for increased teacher pay this year as part of broader changes to the teaching profession
that he is seeking. State senators want to raise the minimum starting
teacher salary from $28,000 to $35,000; their House counterparts want a
raise to $32,000.

“The House is really mostly focused on accountability, the Senate
is more focused on the dollars,” said Mike Cormack, the policy liaison
at the Iowa education department.

In Florida, a call by Gov. Rick Scott to increase teacher pay by
$2,500 has met with agreement from fellow Republicans in control of the
legislature—up to a point.

The House budget proposal for fiscal 2014, for example, includes a
$676 million pot that districts could use to negotiate pay increases if
they chose. Speaker of the House Will Weatherford is also advocating
that some of that money to be used for performance pay.

Bills to require states to drop the common-core standards in
English/language arts and math have recently failed in Alabama, Georgia,
and Kansas at various legislative stages.

However, the battle to stop the standards continues in Indiana,
where Sen. Scott Schneider, a Republican, is overseeing two bills that
would halt further implementation of the standards pending public
hearings this summer.

Mr. Schneider said he hopes the previous opposition
by first-year Gov. Mike Pence to the federal No Child Left Behind Act
as a member of Congress will lead him to approve an anti-common-core
bill that reaches his desk.

Although creation of the common core was led by groups
representing state leaders, the Obama administration has encouraged
adoption of the standards and provided federal aid for developing
related tests.

Bills opposed to the common core are also alive in the Michigan
and Missouri legislatures. (The Missouri legislature adjourns May 30,
but Michigan doesn’t have a scheduled final day for its regular
session.)

Divergent Paths on Safety

Following the school shootings in Newtown, Conn., in December,
hundreds of bills related to school security have been introduced in
legislatures around the country, according to the National Conference of
State Legislatures.

So far, South Dakota is the only state since the Newtown shootings
to approve legislation that allows districts to arm school employees,
including teachers.

But Florida, Indiana, Texas, and others are considering allowing
or increasing the presence of armed school employees, security
personnel, or law enforcement.

Marc Egan, a lobbyist for the National Education
Association, said lawmakers in 27 states have introduced bills that
would allow school personnel other than school resource officers to be
armed, although those bills may not get far, he added.

“Most of the [bills] around arming personnel in schools seem to be dying on the vine or outright rejected,” Mr. Egan said.

In Connecticut itself, meanwhile, lawmakers passed new
restrictions on firearms that include strict limits on the size of
magazines for semiautomatic weapons like the kind used by Adam Lanza at
Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown.

They also revived the state’s competitive-grant program for school
security, and required state agencies to jointly develop new standards
for school building security by the start of 2014.

Similarly, in New York state, new “school security improvement teams” will work with districts to improve emergency procedures.

Virginia and Arkansas have also mandated new assessments and procedures for security.

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So far as we know, we only get one lifetime. So, when I "retired" in 2004, after 31-years in public education I wanted to do something different. I wanted to teach, write and become a student again. I have since spent a decade in higher ed.

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On the campaign trail...with my wife Rita

An action shot: The Principal...as a much younger man.

Faculty Senate Chair

Serving as Mace Bearer during the Inauguration of Michael T. Benson as EKU's 12th president.

Teaching

EDF 203 in EKU's one-room schoolhouse.

Professin'

Lecturing on the history of Berea College to Berea faculty and staff, 2014.

Faculty Regent

One in a long series of meetings. 2016

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